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Fear of collapse surrounded landmark

Broken windows tell the tale of the tornado's swipe at the Great Plains Life Building.

John Zahn's night class on personal achievement became a group quest for survival as the group fled down 20 flights of stairs while the Great Plains Life Building twisted and swayed in tornadic winds.

"It was quite an experience at the time," recalled Zahn, now retired. "The building was swaying, and we couldn't imagine how long it would last.

"I told everyone to avoid the elevators. The lights went out. We had to walk down 20 flights, holding onto the railing, as debris and dust was falling around us," he said.

Investigators later found a considerable amount of plaster had cracked off the stairwell walls between the 16th and fourth floors.

Clocks in the building - which sustained severe structural damage - stopped at 9:45 p.m.

It wasn't until five years later that people began to re-occupy the 271-foot building - renamed the Metro Tower - after the debris-ridden structure was purchased by Amarillo investors for $115,000 in back taxes.

The building, at the corner of Broadway and Avenue L, had opened in 1955 with more than 110,000-square feet of office space. It cost $2.5 million and was billed as "the tallest building between Fort Worth and Denver" by local financiers.

Only 50 percent of the available rental space was occupied when the tornado's 250-mph-plus winds struck the top of the building.

The structure was six blocks from the direct path of the twister.

It was the nation's tallest structure to be hit by a tornado since a five-story building in Waco was hit in 1953.

A Texas Tech University study - sponsored by the American Institute of Steel Construction and the National Science Foundation - reported that the building was hit in an east-west direction by the tornado's weaker side.

Zahn told researchers in 1970 that the motion inside the building was "similar to a ship rolling at sea."

The building's steel frame suffered a 12-inch permanent deformation on the south side, researchers and city inspectors found, and 60 percent of the window panes were broken either by wind pressure or storm-flung debris.

Three of the four elevators were damaged when the support rails were bent.

"Beginning at the fourth-floor level, the damage at the south end of the building was very severe," the Tech study states. "Interior partitions, particularly those running in an east-west direction, were cracked by diagonal tension. Between floors five and nine, all east-west partitions had moved approximately 1 inch to the east."

Door frames were racked. A 45-degree diagonal crack tore through the block wall of the seventh floor. Encasements around support columns were cracked.

For days, radio and television reports predicted the building would collapse.

Engineers hired by the city found the prediction to be inaccurate.

Some tenants went inside to remove their files and papers; others, especially those who had offices on upper floors, hired a crane to remove valuables through the windows.

Within two months, the building was vacated. The Great Plains Life Insurance Co. had moved its corporate headquarters out of the building before the tornado struck.

The Lubbock Downtown Association, comprised of local businessmen, appealed to the City Council to declare the building a nuisance and force its owners to repair or demolish it.

One day before the building was scheduled to go on the auction block in a sheriffs sale in February 1974, Amarillo real estate investors Rufus and Kenneth Gaut bought it. It had an appraised value of $292,930.

After making repairs recommended in the Tech study, the Gauts held a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Oct. 15, 1975, when three floors were ready for occupancy.

Twenty years after the tornado, 50 businesses now occupy more than 70 percent of the building's available rental space, said Karen Higgins director of management and leasing.

"We're doing really well," Higgins said.

The building remains under the ownership of Rufus Gaut. Kenneth Gaut died in 1982.